Gardens: England

09/28/2011

We had spent most of the morning waiting in an Edinburgh queue for our rental car. Then Milo had to go to the bathroom so we stopped in Dunbar on the Scottish coast, where we enjoyed the self-proclaimed "Best Loo of 2010" facilities. In addition to the loo (which really was pretty fantastic), Dunbar boasts the ruins of a "slighted" castle, one deliberately destroyed in 1568 to prevent it falling into enemy hands. The castle is set on a promontory in Victoria Harbor, the day was fresh and beautiful, and we lingered. The children rolled down the steep grassy embankment to the harbor again and again.

So by the time we got to Lindisfarne Castle, our destination for the day, it was early afternoon. I had plucked this site from the British Heritage Pass list in haste, thinking it had literary associations. A Scott novel? (It turned out to be where the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of England's finest surviving illuminated manuscripts, was created in the eighth century. Oh well.) The castle is on Holy Island off the coast of Northumberland, and can only be reached by a causeway. The causeway, in turn, is accessible only at low tide. And the tide comes back in at 3:45 p.m. in August.

We raced across the causeway and skidded into the parking lot just in time to catch the last shuttle bus up to the castle. Our first acquaintance with the truly impenetrable Northumberland accent was when the driver told us, not once but several times, that we would not get to the castle in time for the last entry at 2:30. We just kept saying we wanted to try.

We hustled the children up the steep stone path to the castle entrance. As we were showing our pass to get in, I noticed a pamphlet about the Gertrude Jekyll garden at Lindisfarne. Which I had not known. Anything. About.

I pretty much lost my mind, abandoned Madge and the kids, and raced across the meadow to the small walled garden Jekyll created with her collaborator, the architect Edwin Lutyens, who renovated the castle in the Arts and Crafts style starting in 1901. The two worked together on some famous commissions, but this one, for publishing magnate Edward Hudson, is one of the few that remains. Hudson featured the work of Lutyens and Jekyll, as well as their writings on home and garden design, in his iconic magazine Country Life, confirming their status as households names of the English domestic arts.

I like to think of Jekyll as the Gertrude Stein of English garden history. (She never married, and wore men's boots.)

Although the garden had fallen into disrepair by mid-century, it was restored according to Jekyll's original plan when the property was acquired by the National Trust in 1944. It's one of only four Jekyll gardens left in the world. I had stumbled upon a jewel.

Jekyll's designs are known for their untouched sweeps of lawn and naturalistic planting. Hudson had originally envisaged a vast landscaped area stretching from the original 16th-century walled garden all the way up to the castle walls, creating a unified work of art from house and garden as was typical of Lutyens-Jekyll collaborations. But he ran out of money by the time Jekyll began work in 1911, so she was constrained to this rather boxy design. Needless to say, she rocked it.

Jekyll's signature massed beds of one color,

and unique cultivars--she herself developed almost 60 new varieties and introduced hundreds more to English gardens from around the world--including woolly lambs-ear, a staple of Austin gardens--

bear all the marks of her signature style. She used form as well as color to shape her garden artifacts.

I had only about fifteen minutes in this treasure-box before the tide rolled in. I snapped pictures so quickly I actually broke my camera and had to use my iPhone for the rest of our trip. Madge and the kids almost had to drive off the island without me.

09/17/2011

Plodding down the rain-soaked Royal Mile in Edinburgh in August, we four drought-battered Texans could not have been happier. We toured the palace best known as the royal residence of Mary, Queen of Scots, and then the skies cleared just in time for Max and I to walk through the garden.

Holyroodhouse Palace is the official residence of the British monarch in Scotland, and the Queen spends one week a year here in early summer. (Like Queen Victoria, she prefers Balmoral for family vacations.) Built in the twelfth century by King David I of Scotland, the palace was where Elizabeth I had the advisors of her cousin and rival, Mary, Queen of Scots, murdered, as both a strategy and a warning. We saw the tiny royal bedroom where Mary was sitting at dinner when her men were dragged into the adjoining chamber and audibly slaughtered. Although Mary lived for another twenty years, Elizabeth managed to keep her from the throne. She essentially kidnapped Mary's son James and raised him as a Protestant as the price of letting the monarchy fall back into Stuart hands after her death. The green, northern darkness of the 10-hectare garden seemed a fit setting for this bloody history.

A privy garden has existed on this site since the 16th century, although the current design dates from the 19th, when the current carriage drive was installed to spare royal visitors the trip through the Canongate slums on their way to the palace. Sculptural features include a 17th-century John Mylne sundial and this undated piece of Burnsian whimsy:

The overcast day showed off the garden's subtle contrasts of color

and texture.

For a color slut like me, the garden was a little monochromatic, but it certainly had its dark charms, including lots of my favorite color, purple. As you complete the circuit, you come back around to the front of the palace from which you get a spectacular view of Arthur's Seat, the hill overlooking Edinburgh.

As I write here at the end of the driest 11-month period since Texas began keeping records in 1895, Holyrood Garden's damp northern beauty is a cooling memory.

09/12/2011

In an earlier post, I commented on the beauty and ubiquity of everyday gardens in England--what are known as "cottage gardens." The art of gardening is so widespread and well understood that gardens that look spectacular to North American eyes are seen as nothing special in the U.K.--just what anybody would do. So it was that when I praised the beautiful cultivated quarter-acre outside the front door of Gate Farm, the bed and breakfast where we stayed in rural Yorkshire in August, the owner, Karen, said, "Garden? Oh no. Things are just shoved in anywhere."

Not exactly.

Karen and her husband are the sixth generation of tenants to farm here, dating back to the first decade of the nineteenth century. When Karen married and moved into the house, her mother-in-law had been living alone there for some time, and had not been able to keep up with the garden. (The vine arch in over the path, above, was the work of Karen's father-in-law.) While running the farm and the B&B, raising children, and now looking after grandchildren, Karen has been planting whenever she gets the chance, focusing mainly on big splashes of color.

Like most of us, she doesn't design in advance, but rather edits the garden as she goes along, moving plants as they reach maturity and she realizes they are in the wrong place.

In addition to beautiful planted elements, among the garden's charms are the antique farm implements and machine parts strewn around the space, adding interesting textures, shapes and shadows.

Of course, there is plenty of equipment currently in use as well on a working farm.

Beside the walled-in flowerbeds is an open lawn shaded by a large oak,

bounded by an ancient stone wall,

and hedged with yew.

And from every seat in the garden, you just have to look up to see the breathtaking Yorkshire Dales.

08/31/2011

Travelling with ten- and seven-year-old boys, you come to see the U.K. as one giant Harry Potter theme park. In Oxford, you can do a Harry Potter tour of colleges used as film locations. In Edinburgh, you can sit in the back room of the Elephant Cafe and gaze at the view of Stirling Castle that inspired J.K. Rowling when, as an unemployed single mother, she penned the first two books in the series. (And of course, you can purchase the indispensable "Birthplace of Harry Potter" muggle...er, mug.) But our best day of Harry Potter tourism took place at Alnwick Castle, the "Hogwarts" of all eight movies, where Max and Milo took broomstick-flying lessons.

Fortunately for me, Alnwick is the site of what is reputed to be the most ambitious current garden project in Britain. The castle, built after the Norman Conquest and renovated many times to fit the tastes of different eras, is the home of the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland. The family is in residence for part of every year, and Alnwick Castle Garden is the project of the current Duchess, Jane. Many of the gardens I've written about have the goal of historical re-creation, attempting to showcase a classic design from another period. This garden is decidedly contemporary. Work did not begin on the garden until 1996. Since then, Jacques and Peter Wirtz, the stellar Belgian garden design team, have been working with the Duchess to bring her vision of a "garden for gardeners" that is also a "garden for families" to life.

The first thing you see is a spectacular water feature by William Pye, The Grand Cascade.

The bold linearity of the design is set off by luxurious textures, such as the river rocks at the bottom of the small waterways

that run throughout the garden. At the top of the Cascade is the Ornamental Garden, where this hard/soft tension is expressed through the contrast between the perfectly-trimmed, sharp-angled box and beech hedgesand the lush shapes and intense colors of the plantings.

Once again I greeted the familiar coneflower (ecinachea), which it turns out is as popular a garden flower in England as in Texas, where we like it because it can tolerate drought and heat. Apparently it doesn't object to temperate climes and lots of rain either.

This part of the landscape garden is walled, and makes imaginative use of the textural contrasts between stone and shrub. Often, the relationship is a delightful surprise: it is the artfully-shaped yew topiary that seems hard while the warm, weathered stone looks soft.

The rectilinear crabapple pergolas shaped the space beautifully,

reminding me of the Donald Judd sculptures in Marfa, Texas.

Alnwick Castle Garden currently consists of ten different features, and I was not able to visit them all, but I could not resist venturing behind the locked gate of the Poison Garden.

In addition to well-known posionous plants such as deadly nightshade and stinging nettle, there were familiar garden plants such as laurel and vinca that I had not realized "can kill." Opium poppies, cannabis, and even tea had their place, for as our guide (no one is allowed in the poison garden without a guide) reminded us, addictive substances work because they are just a tiny bit toxic. I'll bet this is where the the students in the Hogwarts Potions class do their fieldwork.

08/04/2011

Stourhead Park is one of the greatest eigheenth-century English gardens,

designed by the wealthy landowner Henry Hoare ("the Magnificent Hoare," a nickname that gave my students lots of giggles) after his return from the Grand Tour of Europe. Like so many other Grand Touring aristocrats, he had fallen in love with the landscape paintings of Claude,

Poussin,

and Dughet.

Returning after several years loaded down with precious artifacts, including rare books and paintings, Hoare decided to create an Italian landscape in the English countryside. Unlike other gentlemen of taste, he did not hire a professional landscape designer but did the work himself. He had the Elizabethan house pulled down and replaced by a Palladian villa,

and also created, over many years, an exquisite landscape garden on more than two thousand acres. Stourhead landscape garden is considered, in the "sister arts" tradition of the eighteenth century, to be both "painterly" and "poetic." It is one of the chief examples of the notion that gardens, paintings and poems are "sisters" among the arts, capable of the highest form of aesthetic expression and thus each possessed in some degree of the qualities of the others. Henry Hoare's garden, then, not only looks like a Claude painting, it also has a poetic meaning, a narrative that unfolds in time as visitors make their way around the property. The most famous of the circuit gardens at Stourhead presents the visitor with a choice between the Path of Virtue, which leads up a steep and rocky climb to the Temple of Apollo

where one is rewarded with a spectacular view across the lake to the misty, Claudian horizon, and the Path of Vice, which leads, by a short, easy downhill walk, to the pub.

I've always loved bringing students to Stourhead and I consider it one of my favorite walks in the world. But on Monday, I decided that since I know the gardens fairly well, I would concentrate on two things: looking that the spectacular collections in the house, which I had never visited, and finally getting some time for a little sketching of my own. It was hard not to feel guilty as I sent the students (and Sam) off up the steep climb while I plopped myself down in front of a hydrangea bush. But my talentless, completely untrained sketches are a major way that I relax, focus, and really see what's in front of me, and I have been missing the practice. Besides, Stourhead's hydrangeas were beyond gorgeous that day, whether seen from a distance,

in a medium shot,

close up,

or even in an amateur's notebook.

And that's why the last four photos in this post are the only ones I took myself.

07/31/2011

It's hard to imagine a greater thrill. I checked out my first Austen novel from the library at Milton Williams Junior High School in Calgary, wrote an essay on Sense and Sensibility at university that became my first academic conference paper, wrote a chapter of my dissertation, which turned into my first book, on Emma, and have taught courses on Austen for twenty years, including two previous times on the Oxford Program. But because I've always been interested in landscape and aesthetic issues in the novels and thus filled up our field trips with visits to famous eighteenth-century gardens, it was not until this trip that I took students to the Chawton House Library and the Jane Austen House Museum in Chawton. The first was the residence of Austen's wealthy brother Edward and the second the "cottage" in which she lived with her mother, her sister Cassandra, and their friend Martha Lloyd and in which she revised, wrote and/or published her six masterpieces.

There is, of course, one greater thrill for a confirmed Janeite such as myself who also happens to be a garden writer.

Yes, here I am in JANE AUSTEN'S GARDEN. Or to be precise, the walled garden planned by Jane, Cassandra and Edward but not built until shortly after the writer's death in 1817. Edward Austen Knight was an early adopter of the nineteenth-century craze for walled gardens. Although the tradition of the hortus conclusus or enclosed garden goes back to medieval Persia, and many gardens were surrounded by hedges or fences throughout the Renaissance, Jacobean and Georgian periods, the nineteenth century saw a technological breakthrough. Gardens surrounded by two brick or stone walls with a narrow space between them could be heated by fires or hot water pipes running through the space. Heat-loving imported plants could be grown against the warm walls, and even the center of the garden could be a few degrees warmer than the normal English climate, thus cheating the temperate summer into a longer growing season. Thus, the espaliered fruit tree is a signature feature of the nineteenth-century walled garden. Here is an espaliered cherry tree at Chawton:

The hardier apples were bearing well in the middle of the garden, where it looks like the gardeners have trained a free-standing tree to look espaliered, a charming effect:

Of course I loved the massed, Gertude Jekyll style flowerbeds,

and was delighted to see an old friend from Austin gardens, ecinachea or coneflower, looking just a little less sunburned than at home.

In addition to the fruit trees, the garden features several vegetable beds including crops like my favorite "pie plant," rhubarb,

which thrives in a temperate climate (it grew in our backyard in Calgary), and North American relative newcomers like squash.

All the produce from the Chawton garden is used to feed the staff of the library, with extras sold at local markets and the proceeds going to the Chawton House Library foundation.

On the other side of the village of Chawton is the Jane Austen House Museum, which also has a beautiful restored garden.

The flowerbeds here were spectacular, showier than those at Chawton, which was after all designed as a working kitchen garden.

There is a small physic and herb garden,

but at its heart this is a place to enjoy what Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, Austen's best-known tree hugger, would call the refreshing sweets of nature.

07/27/2011

There's just too much to say about our whirlwind two-day tour of Bronte country and the seacoast town of Whitby. Improbably brilliant colors under changeable grey skies; every humble dooryard exploding with flowers; wide expanses of wild country in grays, greens and purples.

Walking through the village of Haworth was a lesson in floriculture.

I actually had to feel the petals sometimes to believe the flowers were real.

These are the front gardens of modest row houses, designed, planted and maintained not by professionals but by ordinary people.

Walking past garden after garden gave me a palpable sense of how deeply this art form is sunk into English culture. It is an art that many practice with a high degree of skill, and most know at least enough about to enjoy. It's hard to come up with a North American equivalent...would it be cooking? Swimming? I don't know.

But we could not linger long at dooryards, however beautiful. Our destination was sublimity. We wanted to dare the cliche and walk the moors in the footsteps of the Brontes.

And we were not disappointed. This was another Sam-Baker's-Ordnance-Survey adventure, and we had a glorious time getting lost and then finding ourselves again under skies that alternately smiled and threatened, but were always spectacular.

The landscape contains a wide variety of ground cover and flowers,

always in the same subdued and lovely palette.

Walking back into town after an exhilarating four hours, we visited the Bronte Parsonage Museum and its garden.

At the Parsonage as in the neighboring churchyard where the Brontes are buried, the colors of the flowers against the grey stone walls and endless rows of tombstones seems to add to the melancholy atmosphere rather than cheer things up.

Especially after seeing the dark, expressive portraits and tiny personal effects of the family in the museum, the place felt spooky. Sublime, rather than beautiful.

This mood continued when we arrived at Whitby the next morning and jumped off the bus to gales of wind and temperatures worthy of a Texas winter. A ruined abbey dominates the sea-cliff, surrounded by another enormous graveyard where key scenes in Bram Stoker's Dracula are set. But facing the ocean is also a cheerful crescent of Georgian townhouses worthy of Bath, fronted by--of course--a lovely garden.

07/21/2011

I'm really enjoying spending time in Oxford with my "frolleagues," Sam, Phil, and Sabrina (and 15-year-old Eli). Sam and I both like to hike so Sunday morning we set off early to walk north out of the city of Oxford. Our destination was John Buchan's gravesite in Elsfield, and then we planned to circle back around to the Victoria Arms, a pub on the Cherwell about a fifteen-minute walk from where we are living in the north Oxford neighborhood of Summertown.

After about thirty minutes on bike paths through the suburbs, we hit wheat fields.

It's been rainy the last few days so the track through the fields was pretty muddy. At one point I looked at Sam's pants and thought, "Wow, he is muddy up to the knees. I wonder how he got so much muddier than I did?" Then I looked at my own pants, and they were worse.

Sam had an Ordnance Survey map of the region. Although I've used topo maps hiking in North America, this was my first encounter with the legendary Ordnance, started in the eighteenth century as an Enlightentment project of total knowledge. The goal: to map every square inch of the island of Britain. Often Sam and I would pause to look for the next path and spy a barely-discernible tamping-down of the grass. Could that be it? And THERE IT WOULD BE on the Ordnance Survey map. Not only every cowpath, but every barn, outbuilding, and house was on that map. My parents' ranch in Alberta is criss-crossed with tracks much more substantial than some of those we followed, but I know they are not on any map. Sam kept the invaluable document tucked under his arm:

In this way, we proceeded past the estate of Water Eaton,

under occasional showers, against which I had provided myself with what turned out to be an utterly useless poncho,

through the village of Wood Eaton, and to the Church of St. Thomas of Canterbury in Elsfield.

Sam is a fan of John Buchan, the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Sam had heard that he was buried with his chauffeur, but we could find no mention of this. Looking around at the graves, though, I noticed that next to Buchan's striking circular headstone

was one commemorating Amos Combs with the statement, "for twenty years the friend of Lord Tweedsmuir." I pointed it out to Sam, and he said, "You found the chauffeur?" "But what about Lord Tweedsmuir?" I asked. "Was it a threesome?" No, as it turned out Lord Tweedsmuir and John Buchan are one and the same. Tweedsmuir is a familiar name to me because he was the Governor General of Canada in the early 20th century. There's a private school in Calgary named after him and that's where all my druggie friends got sent when they got into trouble at the public high school. So not only was my gaydar affirmed, I also got some unexpected CanCon.

On our way back into Oxford, we met some very handsome locals:

and later saw evidence of the activity of their wives:

Thinking of eggs made us hungry, and by the time we reached our destination, we had been out five hours. Needless to say, the reward of a Sunday roast at the pub was most welcome.

07/18/2011

Although I've taken students to English gardens on two previous stints on the Oxford Program, this is the first time I've visited Prior Park, just outside Bath. The day before our trip, I gave my students a quick run-down on the emergence of the open, "natural" English garden style, which replaced the popularity of French and Italian formal, geometric gardens as the hot trend in 18th-century Europe. Prior Park is a leading example of the English garden designed by two of its most famous proponents, Lancelot "Capability" Brown (so-called because he was willing to move your trees around and install lakes in just the right places for a perfect view) and the poet and gardenist Alexander Pope.

A few students were ahead of me on the path through shady woods as we climbed to the first viewing-point. As each emerged into the sunlight at the top of the hill, I heard him or her gasp. "Oh my God." "Wow." "OH MY GOD." It was like the restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally. I hurried a little faster.

Here's what we saw:

And yes, it was that good.

The Palladian bridge is one of only four in Europe (the only one outside England was built by Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, and is made of marble). This one is one of the most famous "dazzlers" (architectural features meant to serve as a focal point in the landscape) in garden history. It was completely unavailable to visitors until Prior Park was bought by the National Trust in 1991 and renovated, for the first time since the original owner's death in 1756.

On our busy-busy study abroad schedule, we had only an hour or so in the park before we had to go on to the Jane Austen sites in Bath. Also, my camera ran out of memory and so was able to take only three pictures that day, including the one above. My friend Sabrina took the last one:

07/15/2011

This summer I'm fortunate enough to be leading a five-week study-abroad trip to Oxford University. In the past, when I've been a faculty member on the program, one of its many appeals has been the way in which travel pulls you out of your daily routine and actually opens up new swathes of time. Most of the watercolor sketching I've done, for example, has been here at Oxford on one of my previous two trips.

But this year I'm the Program Director as well as a faculty member and I am shocked--SHOCKED--to have gotten to the end of the first week without posting! Things have been crazy around here. Now that we are up and running I hope to have more time to post about the truly spectacular gardens that are woven into the fabric of the English landscape, urban and rural.

Our first trip out of Oxford was to take the students to see "The Scottish Play"(we were warned not to say the title even while on our way to the theater!) at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. The best historical site among the Bardolatry in Stratford is the Tudor farmhouse known as Anne Hathaway's Cottage.

No, not her. Shakespeare's wife grew up in this house and probably looked more like this:

Actually, if Tudor Anne Hathaway had a Hollywood stylist she would probably be pretty hot. She was already pregnant when Shakespeare married her.

The garden is an attempt to both re-create a Tudor kitchen garden in style and form and to preserve heritage English plants authentic to the period.

Strangely, even though England has had an unusually warm, dry, globally-warmed spring, everything is over-the-top blooming.

I guess dry for England is still pretty wet. And these gardens are of course irrigated for our touristic pleasure.

I especially loved the plants that also thrive in Canadian gardens, such as these incredible sweet peas,

espaliered along a path which leads to a meadowy space planted with apple trees

and a sculpture garden.

This undated piece by Somerset artist Jane Lawrence is called History Play. Behind the standing piece, the cut-out shapes of Great Britain and Ireland lie on the ground, set in concrete. It's quite effective.

We had another glorious day at Prior Park Landscape Garden this week, but more about that in my next post.